It looks like you aren’t quite ready to hire a design agency such as Joofix for your next web project – and that’s ok. We’re here to help. Below you can find a few tips that will help prepare you for hiring a digital agency for your next web project.

View Your Website As a Powerful Business Tool

Viewing your website as a business tool requires a perspective shift. You have to see it as an investment rather than an expense. This shift starts by asking broader, more business-oriented questions.

The objective of almost any web project is to solve a business problem. Perhaps your business problem is that your company isn’t making enough sales, or attracting enough customers, or visible enough to your target audience. Somewhere along the way, you decided that a new or improved website was the right solution for those problems. We want to know about these problems so that we can solve these problems together.

Ponder this question: If your website was an employee, what would its job be?

Define Your Major Goals

The best thing you can do before hiring a design agency is to take time to identify and define the purpose of the project. Maybe you have a website already, but it does a terrible job at selling your product. Maybe you don’t have a website yet, but you know that having one will help your business succeed.

No matter what the problem may be, it is important that you have a complete understanding of the projects purpose before scouting for a web design partner. It is also important that you communicate this with your chosen candidates early on in your conversation with them.

This will set the right expectations upfront and facilitate effective communication throughout the project.

Identify Your Key Users and Target Audience

Sometimes this can be more difficult than you think. Many companies think “everyone” is a sufficient answer, but in reality, there is a primary group of users or a specific demographic of people you want to target first and foremost. It is important that you take the time to identify them so that the company you hire can work towards building a solution that caters primarily to that user.

Set a Realistic Budget

It is important that you understand what you can afford to invest in your business before scouting for potential design companies. Pricing a custom website is just as complex as pricing a custom home. When working with a design company such as Joofix, you can expect to pay between $10,000 and $100,000 for your new website.

We know that’s a huge range, but it really all depends on the features and functionality you want included. If you want a simple website to display basic company information, you are looking closer to the $10,000 figure. If you want a completely responsive eCommerce website to display thousands of products and helps your team save time each day by streamlining internal workflows, you are looking at the higher end of this price spectrum.

Setting a budget upfront will help you narrow your options during the scouting process and will help you establish realistic expectations.

Set a Realistic Timeline

Timelines are perhaps the trickiest part of any web project. It will take time to scout out the right agency, time to send, revise, and sign the contracts, time to get scheduled into their calendar, time for design, time for development, time for content entry, time for approval, and time for launch.

That’s a lot of time.

Therefore it is important that you overestimate your deadline significantly in the beginning to compensate for unforeseen delays from the very beginning.

Understand Your Mobile Needs

Before you can make an educated decision on which mobile solution is right for you, you need to understand how your users are (or will) interact with your interface on a mobile device. An effective mobile website or application should be tailored to their needs, yet still allow them to visit the full-featured version at their leisure.

If your users are mostly viewing your website on-the-go and your primary goal is to have them contact you, you might consider a single page smartphone solution where the page focuses on getting leads. If your users will most often be using your website on a mobile device, then you might consider a fully responsive website implementation.

You can read more about the possible options here.